I am Shichen, a first year MS student in Computer Science at NYU. Previously, I studied photography and video at School of Visual Arts. Before that, I earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Macalester College, where I studied philosophy of mind and consciousness.

My research interests lie in developing scalable and generalizable self-supervised learning paradigms for foundation models across modalities such as vision and video, beyond language. I am interested in how the learned representations can be used for perception, planning, and decision-making.

Research questions I am interested in:

• How can we design scalable and generalizable unsupervised learning paradigms that learn representations transferable across diverse visual tasks?
• How can models leverage imagination to improve planning and decision-making?